by Mike Lupica
“Right.”
“And besides, who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
“Chico Marx,” Richie said, clinking his glass with mine. “Duck Soup.”
“You always seem to know things that I didn’t know you knew,” I said.
Rosie was between us on the couch. I asked if he was feeling any pain. He grinned and said not after two sips of pinot noir. I told him he knew what I meant. He said that he was feeling as good as new and thanked me for asking.
“Why were you spared and your uncle was not?” I said.
“You think I don’t keep asking myself the same question?”
“You had no way of knowing who your shooter was,” I said. “Your uncle had to know.”
“But maybe didn’t know it was the shooter,” Richie said.
“Until it was too late,” I said.
“This can’t possibly be over,” he said.
“There’s a pleasant thought,” I said. I grinned at him. “I take it that you didn’t arrive here unaccompanied.”
“I did not.”
“You think the boys will allow us to walk across the Public Garden to the restaurant?”
“At a respectful distance,” Richie said. “I told them I had my date, they had to get their own.”
He looked less tired than he had the first day after the shooting. But he still looked tired. And did not look as good as new, or even close.
“You sure you want to go out?” I said. “We could order in.” I brightened. “And have the boys go pick it up!”
“I am going to buy the artist formerly known as Sonya Randall a proper dinner,” he said.
He sipped the last of his red wine. I did the same. Like an old married couple, with the baby between us. And armed men somewhere outside.
He blew out some air.
“My father has asked me to ask you once again to leave this alone,” Richie said.
I reached down and absently scratched Rosie behind an ear. She did not stir, which meant she would provide no assistance to me in the moment.
“We’ve gone over this,” I said.
“Now we’re going over it again.”
“No one knows me better than you do,” I said.
He nodded.
“He’s my father,” Richie said.
“Yup. And I’m me.”
I thought: The date is not starting off well. Not the first time.
“I went to see Vinnie Morris today,” I said.
“He told me.”
“Vinnie told you?”
“My father.”
“Sweet Jumping Jesus,” I said. “Desmond is having me followed?”
“Monitored might be a better choice of words,” Richie said.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling at him. “Go with that.”
“This is not easy,” Richie said. “For any of us.”
“I know that,” I said. “Don’t you think I know that? But how about if I ask you to ask your father to stay out of my business?”
“This may sound like an odd choice of words,” Richie said. “But don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Vinnie thinks this all might somehow be connected to some gun deal your father is about to make,” I said.
Richie put his glass down.
“I don’t want to do this,” he said.
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Talk about things in my father’s business about which I know nothing,” he said. “Get between you and my father’s business. Or just between you and my father. I didn’t want to do it when we first fell in love. I have far less interest in doing it now.”
“I am not worried about your father,” I said. “I am worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“One gunshot wound later.”
“I am fine and will be fine,” he said.
“You think that they won’t come for you again?” I said. “Maybe this is just the beginning of this guy torturing your father. Maybe Felix is next. It took exactly one day for things to get dialed up with Peter.”
“My father is a survivor,” Richie said.
“So was your uncle Peter until he wasn’t.”
“I don’t want to fight with you.”
“We’re not fighting,” I said.
“What you used to say when we were married.”
I sighed. It came out louder than I had intended. “I don’t need his permission to do some detecting,” I said. “But I would very much like to have yours.”
“And if not granted?”
I tried to give him a smile that once had done everything except cause his knees to buckle.
“I will have to find ways to persuade you,” I said.
“Wouldn’t that make me the treat whore?” Richie said.
There seemed to be nothing more to say at the moment. Richie finally looked at his watch.
“We should get going,” he said.
“I haven’t annoyed you to the point where you want to dump me?” I said.
“I keep trying,” Richie said. “But it just never seems to goddamn take.”
“Maybe we should agree to drop the subject of your father’s current business interests for the rest of the evening,” I said. “Unless, of course, you just can’t help yourself.”
“I’ll try to maintain control.”
“Never been much of an issue for you, big boy.”
He suddenly looked even more tired to me, as if the conversation had come close to exhausting him. I told him we could Uber to Davio’s, or have the boys drive us. Richie said he could use the air. He walked more slowly than usual up River Street and then Charles and then across Beacon, and into the Public Garden past the small duckling statues that actually made Rosie growl when we’d walk past them.
When we were finished with dinner, there seemed to be no thought, and certainly no conversation, about the two of us spending the night together at my place. Two of Desmond’s men had walked behind us on our way to the restaurant. I had seen one of them at the bar while we ate. When we finished, the car was waiting out front. The man who had been at the bar opened the door to the backseat for Richie and me.
Richie didn’t introduce me to the two men, neither of whom I recognized, which meant nothing. Desmond Burke likely employed a small army of Irish just like them.
When we got to the house, Richie kissed me softly on the cheek. I said I’d call him in the morning. He said not to make it too early.
I went inside, grabbed Rosie’s leash, took her for a quick walk so she could perform her last-walk-of-the-night obligations in the little fenced-in area around the corner that the other residents of River Street Place had sadly nicknamed the Poop Loop. Then we went back inside and I locked the front door and got ready for bed, alone.
At least nobody I knew had gotten shot today.
It might not have been progress. But as my father liked to say, it wasn’t nothing.
SIXTEEN
SPIKE AND I HAD FINISHED a morning run on the Esplanade.
We had crossed over Storrow on the Arthur Fiedler Footbridge, run all the way down to Mass Ave, then back. I had read somewhere that if you were particularly ambitious, or training for the marathon, you could make a seventeen-mile run for yourself on the Esplanade. Spike and I had opted for a considerably shorter distance today.
It was a beautiful morning, enhanced by the sights on the river, boats and crew teams and the familiar skyline of Cambridge on the other side of the Charles, so many of the simple pleasures that the city and its geography and its landmarks and people and culture and history had always brought me.
Now we were making our way back across the Fiedler bridge. I asked Spike if he needed to be anywhere. He reminded me that he was his own boss and a single gay man and cou
ld be wherever the hell he wanted to be on a morning like this.
“The only difference between us,” he said, “is that I will actually be making some money before this day has ended.”
“Thank you for pointing that out, dear,” I said. “But I’m willing to buy you coffee anyway.”
“I accept,” he said.
He was wearing a Foo Fighters T-shirt, baggy basketball shorts that hung to his knees, and some new Hoka running shoes that seemed to include most of the colors of the rainbow.
When we walked into Peet’s Coffee the size of him and the outfit and the shoes commanded the attention of most of the other customers, and all of the people working behind the counter.
“Tell them they’re all fine,” he whispered to me, “as long as they don’t do anything to spook me. If they do, I may burst into show tunes.”
“That will only frighten them more,” I said.
We managed to score a window table. We both had large lattes with extra shots of espresso. I told him about my dinner with Richie and how it had been something less than a triumph, mostly because I felt as if his father had been a plus-one.
“Sounds as if Desmond got romance against the ropes and hammered it with body punches,” Spike said.
“Oooh,” I said. “A sports reference. You know how those make my blood race.”
He was more interested in my meeting with Vinnie Morris, and what Vinnie had told me about Desmond and guns.
“Funny thing about guns,” Spike said. “We’ve got gun laws here as tough as anybody’s. But the illegal guns keep coming up from the South. Used to be if you wanted a gun without paper and were willing to walk around with an unregistered piece, you had to travel down to Bumfuck, Georgia, or Asshat, Virginia, to get one and bring it back. Or head up to Vermont.”
“The Green Mountain State?” I said.
“Don’t be fooled,” Spike said. “There’s always been gun money in them there hills.”
“So you think it’s what Vinnie said, a case of supply and demand?” I said. “And Desmond really has found a way to supply those demands in a more, shall we say, efficacious manner?”
“Efficacious,” Spike said. “Have I told you how much I love you?”
“Not enough,” I said. “I read somewhere that only half the handguns seized in crimes in Massachusetts could be traced back to legal owners.”
“Makes you want to do the math on the unseized guns.”
“Lot of gun money on them there streets,” I said, “especially if you could corner the market, which is what Vinnie suggested my ex-father-in-law is attempting to do.”
“So who might that piss off the most?” Spike said.
“Italians?” I said.
Spike said, “Except I’m not even sure who the big Italians are anymore in Boston. In fact, the biggest one isn’t even in Boston. It’s your friend from Providence.”
“Albert Antonioni,” I said.
Spike raised an eyebrow. Eat your heart out, Susan Silverman.
“Maybe Desmond is cutting in on his action,” Spike said. “But I heard one time that if Albert really wanted business up here, he wanted it to be with Tony Marcus, and that they could make some accommodation on girls down in Providence if Tony could cut him in on something else up here.”
“Wouldn’t just be an odd couple,” I said. “Would be the oddest.”
“Didn’t you tell me that Desmond and Felix and old Albert had agreed to stay out of each other’s businesses?” Spike said.
“Basically, Albert blinked first,” I said. “He finally decided that as appealing as the notion was of having the governor of Massachusetts on full scholarship, he didn’t want to go to war with Desmond Burke over the whole thing. ’Least not at the time.”
“Maybe you need to have another talk with old Albert,” Spike said.
“Me and what army?”
Spike grinned.
“I’ve always dreamed about being a man in uniform,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Somewhat like the Village People.”
“You want me to go with you?” he said.
“Who said I was going?”
“You did and you didn’t.”
I told him I would make some calls and try to set it up. Spike, who liked to brag that he knew more bad men than I did, said he would do the same.
“You starting to feel like you’re in the middle of a Scorsese movie?” he said.
“Little bit,” I said.
He finished his latte and asked which one it was where everybody died in the end.
“All of them,” I said.
He said he was afraid of that.
SEVENTEEN
I CALLED FRANK BELSON when I got home and asked if there were any leads on Peter Burke.
“What,” he said, “you haven’t already broken this thing wide open on your own?”
“Frank,” I said, “stop trying to act as if you don’t like me. Everybody knows that behind that gruff exterior—”
“Lies a complete asshole,” he said. “No, there are no leads as of yet, and maybe not forever. And let’s just say that my bosses, starting with her, haven’t exactly ordered me to drop everything to track down the killer of an aging thug.”
“So the only way we catch this guy is if he comes after someone else,” I said.
“Before I get back to work,” Frank Belson said, “let me leave you with one thought: The fuck do you mean by ‘we’?”
* * *
—
BY NOON THE NEXT day Spike and I were on our way to Providence to meet with Albert Antonioni. Normally I would have asked Felix Burke to set it up, as he had the last time I had been across a table from Antonioni. But if I did that, he would tell Desmond. And I didn’t want Desmond in my business today. So I had asked Wayne Cosgrove for help, and he had put me in touch with a columnist at The Providence Journal named Mike Stanton, who had once written a bestselling book about a colorful and often crooked former mayor of Providence named Buddy Cianci. Wayne said Stanton knew all the players in Providence. Mike called back within an hour with a number for somebody he said knew Antonioni well enough to set it up.
“You people from the big city sure know how to have fun,” Stanton said.
I told him Albert and I went way back.
“Sunny?” he said. “Hardly anybody goes way back with Albert.”
I wasn’t sure if Desmond Burke really was monitoring me, as Richie had suggested. But I decided to take no chances. I told Spike that I was going to walk over to the Taj Boston, walk out the service entrance, and that he should pick me up in the Public Alley between the hotel and Commonwealth Ave. Which he did. At noon we were on our way to Providence.
We were meeting Antonioni at a restaurant called Joe Marzilli’s Old Canteen, which was in the heart of the Federal Hill section of Providence. Mike Stanton had told me the setting was perfect, that in the old days an old boss named Raymond Patriarca would meet guys in an upstairs room there when they got off the train from New York City.
We parked at the Rhode Island Convention Center and walked from there underneath the gateway arch on Atwells Avenue to where the Old Canteen stood, at what looked to me to be the corner of Atwells and 1955.
“Richie is not going to like that you went to see Antonioni without telling him,” Spike said. “As I recall, it wasn’t just Uncle Felix who set up the meet last time. It was Richie who put the whole thing in motion.”
“He did,” I said.
“So you’ve eliminated the middlemen,” Spike said.
“But if you look at it logically,” I said, “I’m actually doing what he asked me to do, and not putting him between his father and me.”
“I assume you don’t actually believe that.”
“Hell, no,” I said. “But I keep telling myself that if I finally get
an actual clue today, it will have been for the greater good.”
“As you continue your tour of extremely bad guys,” Spike said. “Next up being someone who might not just be a bad guy, but maybe the worst guy of all of them. And dangerous as shit.”
“So are you, sweetcakes,” I said.
I expected the place to be dark. It was the opposite of that, with white linen tablecloths and pink walls.
“Hi ho!” Spike said.
I told him to behave. After we were patted down, one of Antonioni’s men showed us to his table. Albert sat alone in a corner, back to the wall. Classic, I thought. There were other tables in the room that were occupied. I assumed that some were occupied by men who worked for Antonioni. Or all. I appeared to be the only woman in the room. There were two younger guys in dark suits at the table closest to Albert Antonioni’s. Two other guys were standing at the end of the bar, one thicker than the other and looking like a bodybuilder in a leather jacket that was too small for him and strained at the zipper. The other was a Richie type, dark and not bad-looking. The thicker one seemed to be working hardest on his tough-guy stare, eyeballing Spike as if he were supposed to go into a dead faint. The Richie type seemed more focused on me.
Albert had a small cup of espresso in front of him. There were two cups and saucers waiting for Spike and me.
Albert had aged considerably since we’d resolved the fate of Millicent Patton. He still had a lot of white hair, combed straight back, and a well-groomed beard. He wore a black suit with a gray shirt buttoned all the way to the top. No tie. He seemed to have shrunk inside himself, in the way old people did, in the years since I’d seen him.
Albert stood up as Spike and I approached the table. Courtly. I shook his hand and noted that he was just slightly taller than I was. But he was still a hard-looking man. I remembered when I had first met him, at a place in Taunton. Richie had told me beforehand not to go all feminist, that I was in the world of Desmond and Felix Burke and Albert Antonioni, and that it was not a day to impress them with my wit and attitude. I managed to keep myself under control. And planned to do the same today.
“Who’s this?” Albert said, nodding at Spike.